It is widely known that many diseases are caused by viruses. It is therefore important to be able to detect viruses and identify a detected virus to be a particular type of virus as quickly as possible, since it could enable diagnosis at the earliest stages of replication within the host's system, and allow speedy medical decision-making. Moreover, accurate quantification of viruses is very essential for the development of their corresponding vaccines and it is desirable to be able to distinguish between different kinds of viruses presented in a sample.
Many studies are being conducted on developing sensing mechanisms that help speed up virus detection and identification. Most of the existing virus screening and quantifying techniques suffer from limitations, such as the need for extensive sample preparation and steps including viral isolation, extraction, and purification, or from the limitations that they are very costly and time consuming to carry out.